ISRO gears up for launch of India’s first solar mission Aditya-L1

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is set to launch the country’s first solar mission called Aditya-L1.

It was announced by Union Minister of State (MoS) in PMO Jitendra Singh in the Lok Sabha.

About Aditya-L1 mission

As part of the mission, Aditya-L1 satellite will be placed in an orbit about 15 lakh kilometres from the earth in a halo orbit around the L1 Lagranian point. It will be launched by using the PSLV XL.

Its primary objective will be to study the solar corona and the chromosphere in different wavebands, dynamic nature of the sun’s outer most layers, and collect data about Coronal Mass Ejections (CME).

The mission is a joint venture between ISRO and physicists from various institutes including Indian Institute of Astrophysics (Bengaluru), Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, (Mumbai) and Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (Pune).

Lagrangian points: They are the locations in space where the combined gravitational pull of two large masses roughly balance each other. There are 5 such points in Sun-Earth system and they are denoted as L1, L2, L3, L4 and L5. In this location, small mass remains at constant distances relative to the large masses.

Halo orbit: It is a periodic three-dimensional (3D) orbit near the Lagrangian points L1, L2 or L3.